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ER-balance

Part 2 Project 2007Michael SpoonerRIBA Studio, UKA balancing act over the Euston Road, this project tackles our responsibility as designers in promoting health. Essential works improve London’s wellness: optimising transport, improving the urban environment, and reconnecting communities. Mend the gap: the deep (Northern/Victoria) and cut/cover (Metropolitan/Hammersmith&City/Circle) lines are bridged in a dramatic and unexpected gesture (above ground), offering cost, time and health benefits. Transport-oriented development: the surgical intervention gives park amenity to the flagship hospital built in this hostile context, without line suspensions. Engineering works: commuters are offered choices, routines are challenged, energy-use reconsidered. Monolithic but site specific, mega-sized but poised, this project re-addresses balance.Michael Spooner

For me the project is ambitious but well resolved; the choice of site, the research involved and the actual design proposal is of a high standard, and I say this based on my experience of my own Diploma students. The relationship between the human body as a physical organism, health, and transport is a very intelligent insight but not easy to turn into a believable design brief. However my view is that this student has done this and made an inventive, technically competent response that also deals sensitively with major public urban space issues at the same time.Tutor(s)